The emergence of the CIA

The United States was the last of the major powers to establish a civilian intelligence agency responsible for the collection of secret information for policy makers. Indeed, prior to 1942 the country lacked any civilian intelligence agency. Information was collected in an unsystematic way by the Office of Naval Intelligence, by U.S. Army intelligence, and by the FBI. The information gathered was rarely shared with other government agencies and was sometimes not even provided to senior policy makers. For example, because of rivalries between army and navy intelligence offices, which did not want to jeopardize the “security” of their information, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was not given sensitive information about Japan in the months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

In June 1942 Roosevelt created the OSS to bring together the fragmented and uncoordinated strands of U.S. foreign intelligence gathering in a single organization. A similar office for this purpose, the Office of the Coordinator of Information, created in July 1941, had floundered as the result of hostile pressure from the State Department, the military intelligence services, and the FBI. William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan, who had spurred Roosevelt into creating an information agency, became head of the OSS upon its founding and was largely responsible for building the organization and for improving its ability to perform economic and political intelligence analysis for senior policy makers. (Roosevelt described Donovan as a man who had 100 new ideas a day, of which 95 were terrible—though he added that few men had 5 good ideas in their lifetimes. Donovan supported the use of exotic poisons against enemy targets and once proposed the use of bats to deliver incendiary weapons against Japan.)

During World War II the OSS, with a staff of approximately 12,000, collected and analyzed information on areas of the world in which U.S. military forces were operating. It used agents inside Nazi-occupied Europe, including Berlin; carried out counterpropaganda and disinformation activities; produced analytical reports for policy makers; and staged special operations (e.g., sabotage and demolition) behind enemy lines to support guerrillas and resistance fighters. Before the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944, more than 500 OSS agents were working inside occupied France. Among reports commissioned from the OSS were assessments of German industry and war-making capability and a psychological profile of German dictator Adolf Hitler that concluded that he would likely commit suicide should Germany be defeated. Under Donovan’s capable, if unorthodox, direction, the OSS was remarkably effective, despite the initial inexperience of most of its personnel. Its successes notwithstanding, the OSS was dismantled at the conclusion of the war.

In 1946 President Harry S. Truman, recognizing the need for a coordinated postwar intelligence establishment, created by executive order a Central Intelligence Group and a National Intelligence Authority, both of which recruited key former members of the OSS. As in the days of the OSS, there were problems of distrust and rivalry between the new civilian agencies and the military intelligence services and the FBI.

In 1947 Congress passed the National Security Act, which created the National Security Council (NSC) and, under its direction, the CIA. Given extensive power to conduct foreign intelligence operations, the CIA was charged with advising the NSC on intelligence matters, correlating and evaluating the intelligence activities of other government agencies, and carrying out other intelligence activities as the NSC might require. Although it did not end rivalries with the military services and the FBI, the law established the CIA as the country’s preeminent intelligence service. The agency was popularly thought of as the U.S. counterpart of the Soviet KGB (which was dissolved in 1991), though, unlike the KGB, the CIA was forbidden by law (the National Security Act) from conducting intelligence and counterintelligence operations on domestic soil. In contrast, the majority of the KGB’s operations took place within the Soviet Union and against Soviet citizens.

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